Ghost stories have always provided a popular source of entertainment, thrilling readers with tales of remote gothic castles and dark dungeons. In the nineteenth century, authors made the genre even scarier by bringing the uncanny within the sanctity of the middle-class home. Women writers especially saw the ghost story as an empowering form, using it to make subversive arguments about gender, class, sexuality, race, and money. In this electrifying collection, Melissa Edmundson showcases ten authors who led lives that challenged Victorian notions of how women should behave and brought those transgressive ideas into their fiction.

This collection includes:

THE FOUR-FIFTEEN EXPRESS Amelia B. Edwards
SINCE I DIED Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
THE SHADOW IN THE CORNER Mary Elizabeth Braddon
THE GHOST AT THE RATH Rosa Mulholland
FROM THE DEAD Edith Nesbit
IN THE SÉANCE ROOM Lettice Galbraith
THE HOUSE WHICH WAS RENT FREE G. M. Robins
THE LOST GHOST Mary E. Wilkins
THE STRIDING PLACE Gertrude Atherton
THE PRAYER Violet Hunt